Addressing question 5 of chapter six false confessions. Innocent suspects confess to crimes they did not commit often because they are terrified, confused and exhausted from interrogations. There are multiple reasons why someone might make a false confession. They could confess because they are deceived or tricked by the police or because they might not understand what they are doing and the consequences of it. Also an individual might confess to a crime they did not commit because they feel hopeless, helpless and isolated. The final reason people often confess to crimes they did not commit was to cover for another individual. According to the Innocence Project, false confessions played a role in nearly 30% of all wrongful convictions that …show more content…
Utah, 110 U.S. 574, 584 (1884). According to Kassin and Wrightsman (1985) there are three types of false confessions: a coerced false confession, a voluntary false confession, and an internalized false confession. I am going to give case examples for each of the following types of false confessions. As mentioned by Redlich and Goodman (2003) there was a case in 1998 where two young boys the ages of 7 and 8 years old admitted to the murdering of an 11-year-old girl after being offered McDonald’s Happy Meals. The juveniles were interrogated without lawyers or their parents present. This was just one very clear example of a coerced false confession. A more serious and controversial example is the 1989 case of the Dixmoor Five where a woman was raped and nearly murdered while jogging through Central Park. Five teenage african american and hispanic boys were brought in a for investigation. All five teenagers confessed to the crime after a combination of 30 hours of interrogations. It was found that they had all falsely confessed after 13 years later Mathias Reyes admitted to the rape where DNA analysis confirmed it. So why did all five teens falsely confess to such a horrific consequential crime? It was because during the interrogations they all had become so stressed and so broken down by the very aggressive and influential interrogations. They began to feel hopeless and they believed that confessing the was in their best interest even when they knew they were innocent (Nesterak,
Why do people feel they need to lie when under pressure? lying is a way to falsify the truth by creating entities or situations that cover the truth. In this case Jay’s wild had gave police information on the syed case in 1999. However recent information provided in a 2015 interview does not match the information given to police in 1999. Jay essentially lied to police but not supplying them with the real information. People feel the necessity to lie while under pressure because of their image,responsibilities,and fear of consequences.
A woman was raped at Central Park and was found unconscious. She recovered quickly after the incident but could not recall what happened on that day. On the same day that woman was raped all five teenagers were there but were at the opposite direction of where the rape incident happened. They were brought in by the police to be questioned and were asked about the incident. The police were interrogating the teenagers and yelled at their faces because they were getting frustrated that they were not getting the answers that they wanted to hear from them. The teenagers were getting tired from being questioned for about two days on something they knew nothing about and wanted to just get out of the place. The police told them to say certain things and told them things that they wanted to hear, which led to the teenagers believing that if they said what the police told them to say then they could leave. They ended up confessing to raping the woman on video and paper and that led to their arrest. Though there were no actual evidence proving they were there at the scene, it did not matter because the police just wanted the confessions, which was their goal from the
In a handful of occasions such as in an interrogation it seems reasonable enough to lie to an individual in order for them to confess to a crime. A case law that shows this was Frazier v. Cupp in which according to Police Link, “ The case involved the interrogation of a homicide suspect who was falsely told that an accomplice had already implicated the suspect in the killing.” In the case of Frazier v. Cupp kept on getting integrated even after he asked to speak to a lawyer so as a result he ended up doing a written confession where he confessed about being part of the murder that was later used as evidence against him.
McCann, Joseph. “A Conceptual Framework for Identifying Various Types of Confessions.” Behavioral Sciences and the Law 16 (1998): 441-453. Web. 8 January 2014.
letter *A* embroidered on her chest. The A served as a symbol of her crime, was
In fact, the minute they bring someone in on reasonable suspicion, there is an 80% chances of the suspect being the guilty party. Therefore, beyond reasonable doubt a blurred line is established. Detectives have evidence to bring in the suspect, getting them to confess becomes the mission of the case. Whether or not they are innocent or guilty doesn’t matter, for chances are their suspect is in fact guilty. And the faster they book someone, the better their arrest record gets, and the further they can advance their career. If it means overlook some information and just aim to get the confession, to pull an arrest, it will
After reading chapter three Alternatives to Self-Disclosure I have concluded a benevolent lie is when someone manipulates the truth to benefit the situation, but not with the intentions of harming anyone in the process. This type of lie is better known as the harmless little white lie that is intended to protect those we tell them too. Learning about this topic pointed out how often it happens without notice, for example my little girl just lost her front teeth and asked me if she will look pretty for her school pictures. My reply was “You’re going to be the most beautiful girl in the world!” Don’t get me wrong, she is beautiful to me no matter what, but not to the world. I just want her to have self-confident in her smile. The most common
The way Hester and Dimmesdale approached their sins has a direct correlation with how they lived the rest of their lives. Hester confessed her sin because she had no choice she already had incriminating evidence in the form of a child and had to confess or be expelled from the community. In this sense, Hester had no choice but to confess or leave the community and she chose to confess. Although, we may not know why she made this choice, but we know she made it and she decided to stay with it and not leave the community in order to possibly confess her sins. Arthur Dimmesdale did not confess his sins for all the wrong reasons. He didn’t confess for mostly two reasons those being: his belief that man did not judge other men but only God can do that or that he will better serve his people with a sinful heart and not a sinful appearance. Arthur had to deal with all the pressures of a life of sin but also the pressure of his own conscience to confess those sins. The pressures on his body were worse than that of Hester who had confessed her sins. One of the main reasons that Arthur was in poor physical condition was that the wise Doctor Chillingworth had poisoned him, and kept poisoning him until he had confessed of his sins at the end of the book. This and the fact that his grief and guilt had led him to totally decimate his body both spiritually and physically he had just driven himself too far. Farther than any person should take this kind of self-mutilation. His social life also suffered as a result of this physical and mental torture because he had turned into a walking zombie and had not been very responsive to anything but his terrible torment. In this way, he was degrading himself and thought it necessary to do so for repentance. Although, he had not voiced his sin publicly he had preached about himself not being pure and being a sinner. In spite of this, the unknowing congregation worshiped him all the more for his self-proclamation of sinfulness without telling what his sin was.
When confronted with a problem, why does the human brain default to lying? Dishonesty is never a solution, although it may seem like the best option in the spur of a moment. My grandma always gave the example of her youth: she avoided and deceived her friend’s sister because the little girl riled everyone. Come to find out, the sister passed the following month due to an illness. I could never imagine the guilt she experienced. Nevertheless, everyone has been deceitful before and many characters were in the tragedy, The Crucible, by playwright Arthur Miller. Reasons for lying are understandable, but most people will admit that mendacity has only caused pain. Lying’s outcome is never positive: it may seem like a good option, for falsehood can save a person’s life, benefit someone, and it eases stress, but these are all transitory.
Depending on what study is read, the incidence of false confession is less than 35 per year, up to 600 per year. That is a significant variance in range, but no matter how it is evaluated or what numbers are calculated, the fact remains that false confessions are a reality. Why would an innocent person confess to a crime that she did not commit? Are personal factors, such as age, education, and mental state, the primary reason for a suspect to confess? Are law enforcement officers and their interrogation techniques to blame for eliciting false confessions? Regardless of the stimuli that lead to false confessions, society and the justice system need to find a solution to prevent the subsequent aftermath.
Garrett, B. L. (n.d.). The Substance of False Confessions. Criminal Justice Collection. Retrieved November 23, 2010, from find.galegroup.com.uproxy.library.dc-uoit.ca/gtx/retrieve.do?contentSet=IAC-Documents&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&qrySerId=Locale%28en%2C%2C%29%3AFQE%3D%28su%2CNone%2C28%29%22Wrongful+Convictions+%28Law%29%22%3AAnd%3ALQE%3D%28RE%2CNone%2C3%29ref%24&sgHitCo
Skolnick, J. H., & Leo, R. A. (1992, January 1). The ethics of deceptive interrogation. Criminal Justice Ethics, 11(1). Retrieved from http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The ethics of deceptive interrogation.-a012396024
The Truth About The Central Park Five “Of the 316 known cases in which innocent people have been exonerated by past conviction DNA testing, nearly 30% are attributable to false confessions” (Kukucka). This was the case for five young men living in the city of New York. At the time, these five men were just teenagers from the ages of 14 to 16, four of them were African American and the other one was Latino. These teenagers became know as “The Central Park Five”. This nickname came about after being wrongly accused and convicted of a violent rape that occurred in Central Park.
Among various arrests, people who are put in jail or prison due to their confession must make them a proven criminal, right? Unfortunately, not everybody who confesses to a crime is in fact guilty. A false confession is an act of confessing to a crime that the confessor didn’t commit. That creates a conflict involving the individual being accused and the trust towards police interrogation. For instance, after nearly eight years in prison, Nicole Harris sued eight Chicago police detectives, alleging that they coerced her confession (Meiser Para.2) The police detectives incorrectly informed Harris in failing “the polygraph test” indicating that she lied about not committing the murder of her son, Jaquari Dancy (Meiser). She felt that there was
Richard Leo, Professor of Law at the University of San Francisco and author of Police Interrogation and American Justice, explains that police officials argued that without “third degree” techniques it would be impossible to solve crimes, but citizens began to question the morality of these tactics. Leo further states juries started to reject confessions they believed were obtained through torture. Between the 1930s and 1960s, police tactics during interrogations gradually changed, partly due to the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement (Leo, 2009). The Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement’s report was published in 1931 and studied misconduct in law enforcement across the United States (Leo, 2009). Layton (2006) states that in 1937 the Brown v. Mississippi case ruled to throw out a “voluntary” confession because the forced confession obtained by police officers through physical brutality violated the due process clause of